This study examines student enrollment patterns within cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania, a state where elected policymakers tend to view choice as a means for school improvement. The findings suggest that despite the more accessible choice sets inherent to the online nature of the cyber charter school sector, enrollment stratification persists along student demographics and feeder district traits. These patterns lead to unequal access to higher performing online schools.

This study explored how a yearlong professional development model guided by the Technology Integration Planning Cycle supported teachers’ technology integration efforts. Teachers’ progress as well as student performance are discussed.

This article details an experiment in which a broad and diverse range of information about schools was assembled and presented to stakeholders in a small urban district. Using a modified deliberative polling experience, authors assess how participants responded to a new, more comprehensive set of school performance information. They found that when users of the new data system evaluated unfamiliar schools, they expressed not only more confidence in their own knowledge, but also in the quality of the schools.

This article reports on a large-scale qualitative study that analyzed data from more than 4,400 learners who participated in one or more of 10 highly rated MOOCs. The author discusses six key factors that can engage online students and nine reasons for student disaffection.

Monster High, a popular transmedia doll franchise for girls, is analyzed as a virtual dollhouse that converges toys, digital media, popular media, and social media in ways that circulate naturalized and normalizing expectations for girls. However, analysis of the digital dress-up and online doll play that children produce and share on social media shows that players also make use of this convergence to remake imaginaries for their own purposes in ways that both reproduce and rupture these expectations.

This introductory article provides an overview of the special issue and addresses digital practices and cultures. Combining conceptualizations by Huizinga and Appadurai, authors suggest that playscapes help to support expanded examinations and discussions of entangled meaning making across space and time.

Through an instrumental case study of a child’s activity in the videogame Madden, Squire and Steinkuehler scrutinize contemporary notions of “screen time” for children and its import and potential risks. The resulting analysis challenges the dosage model of media use assumed in parental discourse in America today.

This article defines and illustrates features of belongingness visible in videogame spaces, highlighting how doing–being–valuing combinations help to contextualize participation. Underscoring the dynamics of hierarchical participation in interest-driven practices, this article has implications for understanding how youth (re)configure their social practices to seek inclusion by using and honing specialist language and behavior.

This article argues that today’s gold standard for identifying what works, the randomized controlled trial, poorly serves each and any individual learner. Elements of this argument provide grounds for proposed remedies in cases where software can log extensive data about the operations that each learner applies to learning and about each bit of information to which a learner applies those operations.

This article reviews recent advances in research by members of the Learning Environments Across Disciplines partnership on the design of adaptive technology-rich learning environments as cognitive, metacognitive, and affective tools. In particular, we examine the use of convergent methodologies and how the design guidelines of the learning environments are grounded in instructional theories and empirical evidence.

Pedagogical agents are computerized talking heads or avatars that help students learn by performing actions and holding conversations with the students in natural language. This paper explores several designs of trialogues (two agents interacting with a human student) that have been productively implemented for particular students, subject matters, and depths of learning.

This article discusses how high quality software can both promote children’s math learning and also provide analytic tools for studying its development over time. Macrogenetic research on digital learning can contribute to the further development of effective math education software, shed light on children’s math learning, and also largely eliminate the need for high-stakes testing and traditional achievement tests.

This article defines how educational technologies can be leveraged for use in collaborative research environments by highlighting the research revolution of ASSISTments, a popular online learning platform, and by outlining the many benefits made possible through educational research at scale.

This article specifies a model to organize both historical and contemporary work to create adaptive learning opportunities and applies it to identify active lines of relevant research as well as areas for additional development.

This case study attempts to understand the contemporary challenges of implementing the collaborative web-based tool and its accompanying opportunities, as well as the contextual factors for its implementation within the district.

This mixed methods study explores the issue of adopting, adapting, and sharing of open educational resources in teacher practice and points out its potentials as well as barriers to diffusion that openness may face in light of economic and political realities of the classroom.

This paper examines how a large virtual school grows and prospers in spite of receiving consistently “failing” “grades” from the state. In answering, the article suggests that the school is not just a school and must be understood instead as part of a fundamental transformation in the nature of educational institutions.

In this article, a typology for an online Socrates Café discussion forum emerges from the theoretical framework of pedagogical and dispositional components guiding the pedagogy. The typology may assist instructors to create and sustain purposeful online discussion forums that engage students in deliberative discussion.

Despite the increased popularity of blended learning in K–12 contexts, relatively little research exists that examines teachers’ instruction in high-tech blended schools. Drawing on cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) to identify and explore the contextual factors influencing teachers’ work, this article traces how teachers' roles and instructional practices develop throughout the first year of a blended learning school.

This article explores for a broad audience the changing landscape of education in the digital age, the changing roles of teachers in a technology-rich education system, and the skills, knowledge, values, and ways of thinking that teachers must have to support students’ social, emotional, and intellectual development in a digital learning environment.

Community college leaders are now turning to social media/social networking sites for new avenues and opportunities to increase students’ interaction, engagement, and collaboration with peers, faculty, and staff. This study examines the use of social media/social networking sites and its relationship to social capital and academic success in the context of community colleges.

This multi-method study explores the potential of virtual coaching as a means for providing sustained external assistance to principals and leadership teams engaged in collaborative instructional improvement.

This paper examines the influence of students’ self-efficacy and expectation, as well as the expectation and encouragement they received from parents and high school teachers on their decisions to major in, complete a degree, and pursue a career in STEMM.

In this article, we explore the ways transnational children identified as certain kinds of transnational, immigrant, or “American” students, while they orchestrated multiple, often competing voices of in multimodal, digital autobiographies.

Computers in LibrariesComputers in Libraries is a monthly magazine that provides complete coverage of the news and issues in the rapidly evolving field of library information technology.

The Center for Distance Learning ResearchThe mission of the Center for Distance Learning Research at Texas A&M University is to provide timely and appropriate information on the development, application and maintenance of information technology systems.

Education, Communication & Information
Education, Communication & Information (ECI) is a major new journal dedicated to exploring the interaction of innovations in educational theory, practice and technologies.

Oxford Review of EducationThe object of the Oxford Review of Education is to advance the study of
education. It especially wishes to promote the elaboration and evaluation of a
body of speculative and empirical theory, the development of which might
improve educational practice.

The International Council for Open and Distance Education The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) is the global membership organisation of educational institutions, national and regional associations, corporations, educational authorities and agencies in the fields of open learning, distance education, and flexible, lifelong learning.